Growing Up Examined: How Missouri's Jesuit Families and Schools Are Bringing St. Ignatius's Ancient Prayer Into Young Hearts

On a Tuesday afternoon in a St. Louis classroom, a group of seventh graders sits in a brief, deliberate silence. Their teacher has asked them a single question: When today did you feel most like yourself? The room holds the quiet for a moment longer than one might expect from twelve-year-olds. Then, one by one, hands rise.

This is not a therapy session. It is not a journaling exercise lifted from a wellness app. It is the Ignatian examen — the daily prayer of review that St. Ignatius of Loyola placed at the very center of Jesuit spiritual life — reimagined for a generation that has grown up swiping, scrolling, and rarely stopping to ask what any of it meant.

Across Missouri, Jesuit educators, campus ministers, and parents are quietly engaged in one of the more countercultural acts available to them: teaching children to pay attention to their own interior lives.

What the Examen Actually Is

For those unfamiliar with Ignatian spirituality, the examen is a structured form of daily prayer, traditionally practiced twice each day, in which a person reviews the preceding hours in the presence of God. St. Ignatius considered it so essential that he instructed Jesuit novices to maintain the practice even when other forms of prayer were impossible.

In its classical form, the examen moves through five movements: an act of gratitude, a request for clarity, a review of the day's events and emotions, an acknowledgment of where one fell short, and a hopeful orientation toward the day ahead. The goal is not self-improvement in the modern therapeutic sense. It is, rather, the cultivation of what Ignatius called consolation — a deepening awareness of God's presence woven through the texture of ordinary experience.

The question that educators across Missouri have been working to answer is a practical one: how does this practice translate for a nine-year-old? Or a sixteen-year-old who has never sat in silence for more than thirty seconds?

Adapting Without Diluting

The challenge of bringing the examen to young people is not primarily pedagogical. It is theological. The temptation, as more than one Missouri Jesuit educator has noted, is to reduce the examen to a feelings check-in — a spiritual version of the mood charts that hang in elementary school hallways. That reduction, however well-intentioned, strips the practice of its essential character.

"What we are trying to preserve," said one religious education coordinator at a Kansas City-area Jesuit school, "is the sense that this is a conversation with God, not simply a conversation with yourself. The self-awareness is real and important, but it is always in relation to something greater."

To that end, Missouri's Jesuit schools have developed age-specific frameworks that honor both the developmental realities of children and the theological integrity of the practice.

For younger elementary students, the examen is often introduced through two simple questions: What was the best part of today? and What was the hardest part? These are not arbitrary prompts. They correspond directly to the Ignatian categories of consolation and desolation — the movements toward and away from God that Ignatius believed could be discerned in the emotional texture of daily life. Children as young as six, teachers report, respond with remarkable honesty when the questions are asked in a calm, unhurried setting.

For middle school students, the practice deepens. Educators introduce the concept of noticing — paying deliberate attention to moments of energy, connection, frustration, or unease — and begin to connect those observations to the language of discernment. A student who notices that she felt most alive during a service project is being invited, gently, into a conversation about vocation.

For high school students, the full five-movement structure becomes accessible, particularly when it is framed not as religious obligation but as a serious tool for navigating the complexity of adolescent life. At one Missouri Jesuit high school, a campus ministry team introduced a weekly written examen as part of a junior-year theology course. The results, by faculty accounts, were striking: students who had never used the word consolation began to employ it naturally, applying it to their own experiences of friendship, academic struggle, and family life.

The Role of the Family

Schools can introduce the examen, but families sustain it. Several Missouri parishes with strong Jesuit ties have begun offering parent workshops specifically designed to help families incorporate a brief daily review into the rhythms of home life. The dinner table, advocates suggest, is one of the most natural settings for this kind of reflection — provided the meal is not itself consumed in the presence of screens.

The resistance is real and worth acknowledging. Many Missouri families are navigating schedules of extraordinary density, and the prospect of adding a spiritual practice to an already crowded evening can feel more burdensome than life-giving. Experienced Jesuit family ministers tend to address this directly: the examen, they emphasize, need not take more than five minutes. Its power lies not in duration but in consistency and intentionality.

One St. Louis mother, whose three children range in age from eight to fourteen, described beginning the practice after attending a parish retreat. "We started with just one question at bedtime," she said. "What are you grateful for today? That was it. After a few weeks, my kids started adding things on their own — things they noticed, things they wished had gone differently. It became a real conversation."

This organic expansion is, Jesuit spiritual directors would note, precisely what the tradition anticipates. The examen is designed to grow with the practitioner.

Resilience in an Age of Distraction

The timing of this renewed interest in the childhood examen is not accidental. Missouri's Jesuit educators are acutely aware that they are working against powerful countervailing forces. The average American teenager spends upward of seven hours each day consuming digital media — a figure that represents not merely a distraction from prayer but a fundamentally different relationship to time, attention, and interiority.

The examen, by its nature, requires the practitioner to slow down, to sit with discomfort, and to resist the impulse to move immediately toward stimulation or resolution. These are capacities that digital culture actively discourages. Teaching them to children is, in this context, an act of genuine formation — and, many would argue, an act of mercy.

Research in developmental psychology has long suggested that the ability to reflect on one's own emotional states is a foundational component of resilience. Children who can name what they are feeling, trace its origins, and situate it within a larger narrative are better equipped to navigate adversity. The examen, while not designed as a psychological intervention, cultivates precisely these capacities — and does so within a framework that gives them ultimate meaning.

A Living Tradition, Passed Forward

What is perhaps most striking about the growth of childhood examen practice in Missouri is the enthusiasm with which young people themselves embrace it, once it is presented with honesty and care. The practice does not need to be sold as relevant. When children are given genuine space to reflect on their own experience — and when they are told that God is interested in what they find there — most of them discover that they have something worth examining.

St. Ignatius was not writing for children when he developed the examen in the sixteenth century. But he was writing for human beings who lived in bodies, navigated relationships, experienced joy and failure, and longed to understand what their lives were for. Those conditions have not changed. Missouri's Jesuit communities are betting that they never will.